Can a painter now practice without irony a style supposed to have burned itself out 50-odd years ago?

This question licks like flames at the recent work of Tom Lieber at Dolby Chadwick.

Lieber has long plied his own variant of Abstract Expressionism: improvising compositions with a briskness that purports to outrun conscious intention. The reminiscences stirred by a picture such as "Shift Red" (2012) - of Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), say, or Georges Mathieu - intensify the search for glimmers of parody or double-edged paraphrase in Lieber's paintings.

Their failure to appear puts a peculiar pressure on the viewer to decide whether Lieber can mean his work as he apparently wishes to - as the inscription of lived experience in an autographic gestural idiom.

The question goes far beyond Lieber's intentions to the historical and artistic context in which he acts on them. If those circumstances do not shore up or make room for the sincerity that appears to drive him, then his efforts risk looking naively decorative at best, self-deluding at worst.

Yet anyone who studies Lieber's painting carefully enough will come to feel that sustained dancing on the borders of mannerism must count as one of its accomplishments.

A close look into the tangle of brushstrokes in "Tip I" (2011) and "Surge" (2012) discovers some riskily displeasing color choices and a willingness to sacrifice masses of detail to overpainting.

The force of Lieber's art flows, then, not from its willed intensities, but from the way it shows us a painter trying to manage the uncomfortable, if not impossible, position in which his sensibility and historical circumstances put him. No wonder his hand travels as if trying to feel its way out of a tight spot, regardless of a working surface's dimensions.

Maxim's moment: While San Francisco painter David Maxim continues to await the museum retrospective he deserves, Sandra Lee provides a congested synopsis of what it might encompass.

The overcrowded installation makes more vivid the variety of things Maxim has made in recent decades. A portfolio of drawings, viewable on request, affirms that product lines are the only lines he has not mastered.

The most startling recurrent motif in Maxim's work: his habit of attaching to a piece, almost as punctuation marks, one or more of the tools used in its making.

"String Drag Diptych #1" (2006) offers a handsome example. Here Maxim attached strings to the outer side edges of two small abutted, stretched canvases, painted white. A paint-stained wooden stick - fixed to the finished work - anchors each row of parallel strings.

Even with this demonstrative information, it remains unclear just how the work was made. Slurries of black paint stripe the canvas surfaces, seeming to flow toward their juncture. But these marks blur as much as they articulate the process of the work's making.

"String Drag Diptych #1" also exemplifies a mingling of humor and gravitas characteristic of Maxim's art. It broaches the weirdly post-minimalist notion of tools as unreliable narrators. His incorporation of crude marionettes into many works invites - or at least does not discourage - such a literary reading.

The "Diptych" may also allude to the "Three Standard Stoppages" (1913), purportedly standard measures that Marcel Duchamp made by tracing dropped strings.

But whatever interpretation it may support, "String Drag Diptych #1" has another quality typical of Maxim's art: a rich physicality.

To discover how this quality manifests itself as Maxim changes scale, materials, techniques and expressive strategies makes any survey of his art worth seeing.